Algeria enters US special watch list
A report issued by the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) on the situation in Algeria has highlighted the systematic religious repression suffered by adherents of minority faiths in the country. For this reason, the body in charge of drafting the communiqué has asked the US government to add Algeria to the "Special Wacth List". This list includes all countries that tolerate, in one way or another, activities that violate the freedom of religion and worship, as well as the right to practice religious rites of their citizens.
The report has thus made public the violent and coercive treatment of religious minorities by the Algerian authorities. These authorities have carried out surveillance measures against certain groups of people because of their religious identity, which is part of the structural repressive behaviour of the Maghreb regime. In addition to this, there are the increasingly common convictions for blasphemy and proselytising, most often targeting Christians, Jews, Ahmadi Muslims and freethinkers.
The US Commission on International Religious Freedom presents itself as a governmental body of the US federal administration that monitors and analyses cases of violations of religious freedoms committed abroad and makes recommendations to the Washington administration accordingly.
In recent years, Algeria - traditionally Sunni Maliki - has shown increasing hostility towards these minority faiths. On the one hand, the Christian faithful, who represent less than 2% of the Algerian population and whose majority branch is evangelical Protestantism, have suffered major raids and seen dozens of churches and places of worship, including the country's two largest Protestant churches, forcibly closed.
On the other hand, the Ahmadi Muslim reformist branch, with around 2,000 believers in Algeria, has been driven underground since 2016, as they are in practice prosecuted for meeting without authorisation. Indeed, it is the followers of streams of Islam that do not conform to Sunni Maliki that are most discriminated against by the government, which has often argued that these Shia and Ahmadi groups are not Muslims.
The USCIRF committee's inclusion of Algeria on the list of countries under special surveillance is intended to exert pressure on the North African government to undertake the necessary reforms of the laws restricting freedom of religion, and thus to put an end to its violation of international law. This persecution and violation of rights is, in fact, a violation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1966, to which the Algerian Republic subsequently acceded in 1989.
The Algerian state is thus considered, along with its counterparts Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Egypt, Indonesia, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Turkey and Uzbekistan, as one of the countries "recommended by the USCIRF for the SWL" (Special Watch List), according to the commission's press release. Algeria's diplomatic situation continues to deteriorate, as it has faced conflicts such as the gas crisis with Rabat and tensions with the French government in recent months.